The American film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen are to preside over the jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the first time in the event’s 68-year-history that the panel has been chaired by two people rather than one. The brothers, whose taut and joyously ironic hits have made them the biggest

The singer James Blunt attacked a Labour frontbencher as a “classist gimp” today after he complained about the dominance of public schoolboys in the UK arts scene. Chris Bryant made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian to mark his appointment as a shadow culture minister. The Rhondda MP

French police were today questioning a dozen people suspected of helping the Islamist gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo as John Kerry, the visiting US secretary of state, honoured the victims of the attacks. The American administration has been widely criticised for failing to send any high-level

Police in France, Germany and Belgium have arrested more than two dozen people in counter-terror raids as authorities across Europe move to flush out potential Islamist cells after last week’s killings in Paris. The raids came after two suspected terrorists, both said to have fought in Syria, were

Hundreds of people queued for hours outside newsagents and bookshops around the UK today to buy the “survivors’ issue” of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Three million copies of the magazine, which carries a front-cover cartoon of a crying Prophet Muhammad, have already been sold in

A man alleged to have inflicted “life-changing injuries” on an Asian customer at a Tesco store in north Wales is facing a charge of attempted murder. Shocked shoppers told how the assailant shouted the words “white power” as he chased his 24-year-old victim through the aisles brandishing a machete

A 47-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of arson after a spate of fires in Oxfordshire this morning that destroyed the offices of two district councils. The first target was a thatched cottage in the village of Rokemarsh. Police said that an 80-year-old woman inside the cottage managed to

A bull which sired a record half-million calves without ever having sex as nature intended has been laid to rest in the United States, hailed as a legend of the dairy industry for both the quality and the quantity of his sperm. Toystory, a 2,700lb colossus, produced more than 2.4 million “straws

A former American football player has told how he was circled by a shark and stung by jellyfish as he swam nine miles back to shore after falling from his boat off the coast of Florida. Robert Konrad, a former Miami Dolphins fullback, was on a solo fishing trip off Palm Beach when he hooked into a

A French cartoonist who narrowly missed last week’s massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo broke down in tears today as he described drawing a tearful Prophet Muhammad for the cover of this week’s edition. Three million copies of the so-called “survivors’ edition” are being printed for